


innamorati

by atiredonnie



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: F/M, i just finished chimera ant arc and immediately went oh... they’re soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25357480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie
Summary: The first time, Komugi dies with carapace in her lap, bare fingers drifting over an expanse of something not quite human but unmistakably beautiful. Smooth, chitinous armor, and beneath the hardness, the pliable curve of a closed mouth that emits no more breath. How precious it was, she thinks, vessels bursting in her skull, to adore and be adored by someone so handsome in her final moments. She closes her eyes, and prepares to sleep.But there is not yet rest for the two of them. Not yet.
Relationships: Komugi/Meruem
Comments: 8
Kudos: 64





	innamorati

The first time, Meruem dies in the dark. His head is in soft white hands, and the flickering neurons in his brain not yet drowning in blue-black blood manage to produce muffled murmurs of kind, good, love, rest. All of those things sound good to him, now. And he is so tired.

The first time, Komugi dies with carapace in her lap, bare fingers drifting over an expanse of something not quite human but unmistakably beautiful. Smooth, chitinous armor, and beneath the hardness, the pliable curve of a closed mouth that emits no more breath. How precious it was, she thinks, vessels bursting in her skull, to adore and be adored by someone so handsome in her final moments. She closes her eyes, and prepares to sleep.

But there is not yet rest for the two of them. Not yet. 

The second time, Meruem wakes up on the train, skeletal blue and purple lights flickering from darkened windows. He blinks, shaking his head, and for a second he thinks, viciously, that the plantation of his open hand is wrong, that his digits are wrong, that the normalcy and humanity he senses in himself is wrong. And then he dismisses the thought, because he’s 21 and poor in Yorknew City and has no time for fantasies or memories of the vastness of pain, not when there are potential future employers to impress.

Meruem doesn’t get the job. That’s not exactly a surprise - he stinks like an oiled-up streetcar and the way he talks, slowly, dispassionately, eyes inhumanely wide - well. It doesn’t exactly appeal to most. Nor does the impression he often gives off, the slight implication of superiority in his actions. He’s not doing it on purpose. It’s second nature to him, and when he rolls over why in his head, crouched on a bare mattress at home later that night, he distinctly feels the vastness of a fist pressed up against his frontal lobe. Knuckles flush against some integral part of his brain, and he lets it go before he bursts at the seams.

The second time, Komugi wakes up and the world is flooded with sensation and color. She crawls to the kitchen on her hands and knees, and stares at a dark, deeply red pomegranate, and cries until she falls asleep right there on cold tile. 

When she wakes up she does not remember crying at all, despite the wetness on her face. She dries her slick cheeks with a hand towel and goes out to feed the birds.

Komugi sees the sky and nearly faints. Why is it that she lacks all the synonyms for blue? Why is it that nothing comes to mind, that when gaping up at the vast expanse of sky it takes her more than a few seconds to match it to blue at all? Something isn’t right, a stubborn little voice insists, there’s something that just isn’t clicking. Komugi tightens her fists and stares out blankly before slowly and deliberately letting go, knots undoing, a scarf pulled apart in the wind. She has a class to get to, after all.

Meruem watches a girl watching him. She watches in a way that is less than discreet, he thinks, and sloppily, like the very act of watching is something she can’t indulge in enough. It has everything and nothing to do with him, the gazing. She looks as if looking is the only thing she knows how to do, and the only thing she knows how to enjoy. And she uses her vision, the one she is seemingly so infatuated with, on him. She watches without pretense, huge and wet in her stare, and he ignores Calculus in favor of playing chess online. 

He moves his knight and thinks wrong, wrong, wrong. And yet it’s the optimal move, the perfect move. It’s the pieces that don’t fit, slotting wrong in his brain, slipping through the cracks like water funneling down destroyed pavement. 

He grits his teeth and closes the tab.

Chess is not the right game. 

Komugi continues to watch. The curve of his face is as familiar as that of her palm, she realizes with a start, and that her eyes are not well antiquated with the slope, but said palm certainly is, or was, at some point - the tenderness of featherlight touch, the mapping of lips and closed eyelids with the pads of sensitive fingers, and. Well. Komugi’s head throbs. Her cheeks burn. 

“Is there something,” Meruem says slowly, “wrong with my face?” 

Komugi yelps, leaping in her seat. “No, never!” She laughs, shrill, arms heavy with goosebumps from just the deep rasp of his voice, familiar and elusive all at once. She feels the scrape of it against her spine. “It’s the same as ever!” 

“So you have looked before.” Meruem says, a flat statement of fact. Komugi blinks, flooding with color, and yet as her hands tremble in her lap her words are sure. “That’s the funny thing! I don’t think I have, but it feels like a constant in my life. Like I could just reach out and the first thing I felt would always be your brow. Impolite, for a girl of my status! I know! But I can’t help it.” Meruem frowns, drowning in his own thoughts, a rush of hot feeling and confusion overwhelming his synapses as they flicker weakly with the weight information that burns to the touch. Komugi presses on. “I know this is very presumptuous of me! But. If you’re willing to, I’d like to buy you lunch. I want to touch your face again.” She says, eyes still roving hungrily over his blank expression, and then shudders at her own words, pinker than pink. 

And for a second Meruem glows with the fact that she is aware of this pinkness, that she understands the notion of blooming like this, the gentle unfurling of a sunset shade on her bare skin, that she can watch the sunset, over and over if she so pleases, watch the sky blur and fade together like pigment, running water in orange, yellow, twilight blue. The rawness of this feeling bites at him, the pressure of teeth against his jawline, and he only manages a nod.

They go get burgers. 

Meruem picks at his meal and feels unusual, the texture of the meat foreign and yet familiar on his tongue, the sight of the bloodied beef a bizarre invocation of shame and guilt and splintered personhood. Komugi, meanwhile, eats like a starving person, dripping snot all over her plate, and Meruem can’t even begin to be disgusted, nor to even think of repulsion, because it feels so satisfying that she is able to eat like this. 

It feels so important, and he does not know why.

Komugi stuffs a final crumb of bun in her face and emits a delighted sigh, dissolving into what appears to be a puddle of goo vaguely resembling a human in her chair. A small smile spreads across Meruem’s face, at first slowly, and then all at once. At the sight of this, Komugi squeaks, immediately and insistently rubbing the backside of her hand over her face - which doesn’t accomplish much, because her hands are dripping with grease as well. A warmth builds in Meruem’s throat at the sight, with the lightness and air of champagne bubbles, and before he knows it he’s laughing as Komugi pouts. 

“Your name is Komugi, correct?” 

He doesn’t know why he asks, because he knows it’s true. More so than he knows the truth of his own name. It’s delicate on his tongue. 

Komugi smiles and nods. 

They fall in love slowly, and then all at once.


End file.
